For those of you who don’t know yet

The Coffee Complex began after noticing how certain demographics gravitate to particular coffee orders. You may want to believe a person’s coffee order is arbitrary. But there are strong correlations between the type of person you are and the type of coffee you order, just like there are correlations between certain types of people and their choice of clothes or cars. There are outliers, of course. But have you ever seen a tradie order oat milk short mac with stevia? That’s what I thought.

Soy Latte

If you're a soy latte drinker, you are likely an earthy type—as in, you like community markets and, curiously, you always smell of incense. And if someone asked you what your favourite baby names are, you’d mention ones like Dusk, Skye, Indigo, Sage, Liberty, Ziggy, Ode, Harmony, Autumn, Daisy, Willow, Sol-Xavier (that’s a shout-out to my godson), Ray, Rain, Zappa, Arlo, Marley, Cedar, Carly, Petuli, Sundance, Rainbow-Pepper-Bluebell-Meadow.

You order lattes because black coffee is too strong. Plus, you enjoy the extra foam of a latte. And you order soy because you’re vegan—for ethical reasons, of course. But you don’t miss having dietary freedom. You’ve never liked the taste of steak anyway. And cheese and honey are overrated. Well, that’s what you tell your friends anyway.

But here’s what you didn’t tell them: When you dined at the local Indian restaurant, you had a slip-up. You ordered the obscure vegetable dish which the cook had to custom make for you (ghee was in every dish). But the dish tasted like over-steamed veggies. While the cook, a lady from New Dehli, was used to catering for vegetarians, she didn’t know how to adapt authentic dishes into vegan ones. Not tasty ones anyway.

When you saw the butter chicken come out, your mouth began salivating like a starving labrador at a Southern barbeque. And you grabbed a bit of chicken when nobody was looking. Here, you must’ve pulled a face close to the one you pull when you have an orgasm because your friend said: “Enjoying yourself over there?”

But even if you weren’t vegan, you still wouldn't have cows milk. It makes you bloated. You probably wouldn’t stay bloated for long, though, given your daily intake of kombucha and lentils.

If you forget your keep cup and need to take the coffee away because you’re late for work or a yoga class, you ask the barista if you can borrow a ceramic mug reserved for diners, promising to bring it back tomorrow.

When the barista denies your request, you become red-faced with anger. Why does nobody think of of the turtles? Still, you comply. (After all, you’re a humanist as well as an environmentalist.)

But you ask for no lid because the plastic is not biodegradable.

If you forget to bring in a keep cup the next day, you grab the paper takeaway cup from the previous days coffee which was left in the cupholder of your old but fuel-efficient hatchback.

Why chuck out a perfectly reusable cup?

You wash the cup with water from a steel water bottle (a brand which donates 10% of funds to environmental causes). But you’re not meticulous about the washing. A bit of left-over curdled soy milk never hurt anyone, especially not you—you’ve stomached street food in Nepal before.

At the counter, you ask whether the banana bread is vegan. “Absolutely not,” the barista says. Then you tell the barista about the forgotten keep cup again, as if not having one requires justification. You give him the washed paper cup and ask him to put the soy latte in that. The barista smiles, takes the cup and chucks it out anyway.

Oh, and did you mention you were vegan?

. . .

Hi, if you like that malarkey ^^^ then you'll like my newsletter. It's an ode to stuff about cafes and culture worth your attention. Plus other things....